Cultural Transactions: An Introduction to Medieval Seals from a Global Perspective

Extensive geographic coverage, including China, South East Asia, Arabia, Sasanian Persia, the Muslim Empire, the Byzantine empire, and Western Europe allows the essays gathered in this volume to offer a well differentiated examination of seals and sealing practices between 400 and 1500 CE. Contributors expose rather than assume the inter-subjective, transnational, and transcultural connectivity at work within the varied processes mediated by seals and sealing – representation, authorization, identification, and transmission. These essays encourage an understanding that seals operated in liminal, transitional situations arising from legal, administrative, martial, mercantile, or diplomatic encounters, creating cross-cultural sealing networks in which adaption and accommodation underlay the force of seals as objects and images that generat